But a $40 external enclosure can keep your old drive going as a “just in case” backup, or let you choose the specific brand new internal drive you want from a great manufacturer. In short, if you’re pulling a hard drive out of a three- to five-year-old Mac that’s been left powered on for most of its life, you might be better off disposing of it rather than continuing to use it until it fails. This year, Backblaze updated its findings with new failure statistics, noting that it now has over 41,000 drives in use. It found that Seagate’s latest 4TB drives are much better than ones it previously tested - still about twice as failure-prone than Hitachi GST drives, but not 20 times worse (like Seagate’s 3TB drives). Western Digital and Hitachi GST drives otherwise remained excellent. Comparing Seagate, Hitachi GST, and Western Digital disks of various capacities, Backblaze found that Hitachi GST’s drives had the lowest failure rate at any capacity, followed closely by Western Digital, with Seagate ranking a very distant third. “If the price were right,” Backblaze said, “we would be buying nothing but Hitachi drives.”īut nothing’s set in stone: Western Digital now owns Hitachi GST, and Seagate has been working to improve the reliability of its drives. With over 27,000 drives on hand, Backblaze last year published the most comprehensive independent test results I’ve seen for consumer-grade hard drives. Hard drives aren’t all created equal, and they aren’t built to last forever: good drives typically last for around three years of very active use, and great ones for five years. Without a computer or another enclosure surrounding them, these hard drives are called “internal hard drives.” They’re small metal boxes akin to old-fashioned record players, with one or more spinning disks (“platters”) that get accessed by a “ read/write head” (shown above).
The vast majority of Macs in homes have mechanical hard drives (rather than chip-based SSDs) inside.
Photo credit Eric Gaba, Wikimedia Commons user Sting A Quick Primer On Internal Hard Drives
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